that vegetation by rubbing, as they often did, against the high wooden pale--itself made picturesque by age--which hedged them in their sylvan prison for miles. Moreover, there were wild-cattle, as at Chartley (though not of the same breed), the repute of whose fierceness kept the few public paths that intersected this wild domain very unfrequented. These animals, imported half a century ago, were of no use nor of particular beauty, and would have dwindled away, from the unfitness of the locality for their support, but that they were recruited periodically, and at a vast expense. It was enough to cause their present owner to strain every nerve to retain them, because they were so universally objected to. They had gored one man to death, and occasionally maimed others, but, as Carew, to do him justice, was by no means afraid of them himself, and ran the same risk, and far oftener than other people, he held he had a right to retain them. Nobody was obliged to come into his park unless they liked, he said, and if they did, they must "chance a tossing." The same detractors, whose opinion we have already quoted, affirmed that the Squire kept these cattle for the very reason that was urged against their existence; the fear of these horned police kept the park free from strangers, and thereby saved him half a dozen keepers. That his determination in the matter was pig-headed and brutal, there is no doubt; but the Squire's nature was far from exclusive, and the idea of saving in any thing, it is certain, never entered into his head. The time, indeed, was slowly but surely coming when the park should know no more not only its wild-cattle, but many a rich copse and shadowy glade. Not a stately oak nor far-spreading beech but was doomed, sooner or later, to be cut down, to prop for a moment the falling fortunes of their spendthrift owner; but at the time of which we speak there was no visible sign of the coming ruin. It is recorded of a brother prodigal, that after enormous losses and expenses, his steward informed him that if he would but consent to live upon seven thousand a year for the next ten years, the estate would recover itself. "Sir," returned he in anger, "I would rather die than live on seven thousand a year." Our Carew would have given the same reply had twice that income been suggested to him, and been applauded for the gallant answer. The hint of any necessity for curtailment would probably have caused him to double his expenditure forthwith, though, indeed, that would have been difficult to effect. He had already two packs of hounds, with which he hunted on alternate days, and he had even endeavored to do so on the Sunday; but the obsequious "county" had declined to go with him to that extent, and this anomaly of the nineteenth century had been compelled to confine himself on the seventh day to cock-fighting in the library. He kept a bear to bait (as well as a chaplain to bully), and ferrets ran loose about Crompton as